Flexible Thinking

Alexander Liss

06/30/04

Changing circumstances, new areas of decision-making prompt creation of new Descriptions of reality. In well-formalized areas, these Descriptions take form of scientific concepts and models; in less formalized areas they take form of "ideas" often supported by "movements".

Different such Descriptions compete each with other. Some of them acquire following; usually they are ones, which relate closely to:

• the way we function, particularly the way we think
• the way society functions, especially tendencies of social development, particularly in intellectual area
• a body of existing Descriptions.

Ones, which provide a simple logical presentation of a situation being in a focus of social attention at a moment, have better chances to be accepted.

In some cases, we could prove that a new Description is logically derived from a set of already accepted Descriptions. However, any such Description stands in isolation from reality and one has to find a largely informal way of application of it to a particular situation.

We do not have a sure way of deciding, which Description is right, and we have this mechanism of challenging and incorporating of Descriptions in our thinking.

There is a troubling tendency in this mechanism, which has to be perpetually and consciously mitigated.

There is a tendency of solving a problem once and forever.

It is usually is accompanied with taking a poetic, symbolic, internally self-contradicting Description and declaring it as a logical one and "forgetting" that such approach provides only a partial view. Next goes declaring this partial view being a complete and universal logical Description and acting upon it.

This tendency seems to be caused by deficiency of our thinking.

Cost of mistakes in decisions caused by this tendency is increasing, because power of tools available to individuals is increasing. In addition, society is changing with growth of population, and individuals have to make decisions in areas, where they do not have experience or training.

This makes training in intelligent and educated thinking, which allows compensating for this tendency in thinking, a necessity in a stable of society.

Following are examples of currently popular wrong approaches, which have to be corrected and variants of their correction.

Often, the offered correction is:

Acceptance of a difference between poetic (symbolic, illogical) and logical Descriptions and not trying to reduce one to the other

Making a two layered system of ideas: top more stable layer is a set of unreachable goals and the second layer, which changes more often is a set of practical measures of approaching these goals through achievable iterations

Moving from a narrow partial view to a broader view, which includes in replaces a factor taken in consideration with an a set of factors or adds other factors.